Public Services 2.0
Essay and research project by Charles Leadbeater for Demos in the UK, concerning participative approaches to social care.
URL = http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/archive/public-services-20.aspx (essay)
Description
"With the think tank Demos I am launching a project in 2007 to explore the potential for public services to be designed to elicit user participation and contributions. Initially our work, funded by the Department of Health and the Improvement and Development Agency for local government will focus on highly participative models of social care, particularly those developed by In Control, a joint venture project between Mencap and the Department of Health. The project will explore how these highly participative models work and how they could be extended to cover all of social care and potentially over areas of public services such as health and education. We will also draw on international and city-based case studies. As well as a final report, which will be published in the Autumn, we plan a handbook for local authorities seeking to promote participative approaches in practice." (http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/orange-buttons/public-services-2.0.aspx)
Discussion
From http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/archive/public-services-20.aspx:
"We need a new way to create public goods that take their lead from the culture of self-organisation and participation emerging from the Web that forms a central part of modern culture, especially for young consumers and future citizens. Increasingly the state cannot deliver collective solutions from on high: it is too cumbersome and distant. The state can help to create public goods - like better education and health - by encouraging them to emerge from within society. The tax system increasingly depends on mass involvement in self-assessment and reporting. Welfare to work and active labour market programmes depend on the user as a participant, who takes responsibility for building up their skills and contacts. Neighbourhood renewal has to come from within localities, it cannot be delivered top down from the state. Public goods are rarely created by the state alone but by cumulative changes in private behaviour.
The chief challenge facing government in a liberal and open society is how to help create public goods - like a well educated population, with a appetite to learn - in a society with a democratic ethos, which prizes individual freedom and wants to be self-organising and "bottom-up". Government cannot decide on its definition of the public good and impose it from above, at least not continually. But nor can it stand back and accept whatever emerges from self organising systems. Government's role is to shape freedom: getting people to exercise choice in a collectively responsible way and so participate in creating public goods.
Productivity should rise because highly participative services can mobilise users as co-developers and co-producers, multiplying the resources available. Participation allows solutions to be tailored more readily to individual needs and aspirations; people have to share responsibility for outcomes and devote some of their own inputs. Participation is the best anti-dote to dependency if they equip people with tools so they can self-provide and self-manage rather than relying on professional solutions and services. Participative approaches are not only vital to create more personalised versions of existing services - like health and education - but also to address emerging needs and issues - such as waste and recycling, community safety and long term conditions - where public outcomes depend on motivating widespread changes to individual behaviour. Participative public services connect the individual and the collective in new and far more powerful ways than seeing people as taxpayers, occasional consumers and even more infrequent voters.
The triumph of the modern industrial public sector is is the creation of institutions on a vast scale, which provide services such as education, health and policing, that were might have once been limited to just a few. These universal systems aspire to deliver services that are fair and reliable. Yet that in turn requires codes, protocols and procedures, which often make them dehumanising. After Ivan Illich trained as a priest he went to work in a poor Puerto Rican neighbourhood in New York and he was struck by how many other institutions seemed to be modelled on the church and how many professions seemed to take their cue from the priesthood.These institutions and the resources they control become the power base for the new priesthoods: the public service professionals.
The dominance of professions, creates two big problems, according to Illich: counter-productivity and dependency culture.
As people become more dependent on the expert knowledge of professionals so they lose faith in their own capacity to act. The rise of professional power is mirrored by a loss of individual responsibility. We become cases to be processed by the system. Education and health come to be commodities to be acquired rather than capabilities we develop in ourselves to live better lives. We now identify services delivered by professionals with the ultimate goods we want as a society: health, learning, safety, order, justice.
First, public institutions and professional should educate us towards self-help and self-reliance as much as possible. As Ivan he Illich put it in Deschooling Society in 1972: "Good institutions encourage self-assembly, re-use and repair. They do not just serve people but create capabilities in people, support initiative rather than supplant it." Almost thirty years later the Wanless Review of health spending reached exactly the same conclusion. We will only become a healthy society if we restore the proper balance between professional service and self-help. The golden rule must be that instruction by professionals must never outweigh opportunities for independent learning; any service must be designed to motivate and enable self-help.
We need much greater emphasis on intelligent self-assessment and self-evaluation. That is already the lynchpin of the tax system and should play a greater role in education and health. The education system schools us to think of assessments as exams, something we do at the end of the pipeline, checked by a professional. We need an education system that builds up capacity for intelligent self-evaluation, so that we are better equipped to assess and solve problems under our own steam, with the help of our peers and professionals if needed. An education system for the 21st century would have constant self-evaluation, much of it through peer to peer criticism and support, at its core.
In Limits to Medicine Illich described goal of making health as a personal task, which people must take responsibility for for this way: "Success in this personal task is in large part the result of the self-awareness, self-discipline, and inner resources by which each person regulates his own daily rhythm and actions, his diet and sexual activity...The level of public health corresponds to the degree to which the means and responsibility for coping with illness are distributed among the total population."
These ideas are not appropriate to every aspect of public services. People in need of urgent and acute surgery do not generally want to be participants in the process: they want a good service, delivered by professionals. Too often the ethic of self-help can be used to get us, the users, to do more of the work ourselves. Self-service is not the same as participation.
Yet the range of ways we can create public goods is expanding. In energy, for example, nuclear power might provide part of the solution to global warming but so too could highly distributed, domestic micro-generation. Schools and hospitals will continue to exist but in an environment where more learning and health care can be delivered, informally and at home. People will want to be consumers some of time, participants at other times, when it makes sense for them. (http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/archive/public-services-20.aspx)
More Information
Government 2.0: research project by Don Tapscott